Financial company executives are making a habit of apologizing for bad decisions and/or bad behavior these days. Or, at the very least, admitting they got some serious ’splainin’ to do.
Following the trend, John Thain quickly responded to the charges leveled at him last week by journalists and Bank of America insiders. The characterization of Thain as ethically impaired and culturally tone deaf – spending more than a million dollars on office redecoration as the financial system was heading toward collapse – was taking hold in the public’s consciousness.
Yesterday Thain released a memo to Merrill Lynch employees explaining that BofA was fully informed about huge losses at Merrill and also signed off on how and when bonuses were awarded to Merrill employees. To what extent that’s true will be debated over time.
What’s most interesting, of course, is this business about redoing the office (which is not pictured above). It’s rich with symbolism. Who spends $1.2 million on redecorating? Fat cats. People who think they’re better than everyone else. Not usually people who later beg the government for money.
Thain smartly agreed to repay the costs of the remodel and acknowledged that “in the light of the world we live in today,” such excess looks pretty ugly. But it begs the question: At what point – in what “world,” to borrow Thain’s terminology – does it make sense to spend more than a million dollars on office decorating?
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo posted this video of CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo asking Thain what was wrong with the office he inherited from his predecessor, Stan O’Neal? Thain trips through an explanation that O’Neal’s “office was very different than the general décor of Merrill’s offices. It really would have been very difficult for me to use it in the form that it was in.”
Huh. To me, it sounds like Thain is holding back. There’s something he doesn’t want to say – like O’Neal had Strawberry Shortcake stickers all over his desk, or he used to cure meats in the corner and the place stunk to high heaven. I can only wonder.
What we need is one of those HGTV shows to give us the before and after shots of the office so we can judge for ourselves. Of course, one of those HGTV shows could have done the whole project for about $1,000.
